“Get Together and Bind Themselves Through Promises”: Arendt’s American Revolution, the Constitution of Freedom, and the Problem of Collective Self-Binding

Join political theorist Jan Smoleński for a provocative exploration of Hannah Arendt’s overlooked idea of self-binding—and how it reshapes our understanding of the American

Revolution, constitutional freedom, and the durability of democracy.

Hannah Arendt credited the success of the American Revolution to the founders’ ability to create a stable foundation and bind themselves to it. This talk revisits her underexplored concept of self-binding, connecting it to her ideas of power, freedom, and promise—and contrasting it with dominant constitutional theory. By “thinking with and against” Arendt, Smoleński offers new ways to imagine the possibilities and limits of constitutional order today.

For questions: Prof. Dean Caivano dcc212@lehigh.edu